Re: Minutes from 16 November 2000 WCAG WG telecon

At 7:45 PM +0000 11/27/00, Sean B. Palmer wrote:
>I'd have to say that "XHTML 1.0" is most certainly *meant* to be a document
>markup language, even if people don't use it as such.

It's "meant" to be, but that doesn't mean much.  The problem with
XHTML is that they are still thinking in terms of "documents" (by
which they mean the traditional HTML document) and not in terms of
functionality.  Note that there's still, for example, no way to
designate the navigation sections of a page!  XHTML is at best a
crappy presentation language, and is terrible at any sort of document
representation besides the most basic, simple form of document.

>Also, the HTML WG Roadmap specifies that XHTML 2.0 will more likely
>than not be a pure XML version of XHTML, with no presentational aspects.

Presentation doesn't matter, if their vision of a document is still
so disastrously out of sync with the way the web is used.  Look at
nearly any web site out there, and you will find that it cannot
easily fit into the HTML model of a "document" with headers,
paragraphs, and the like.  If you were designing a language to model
those sites, you would -not- create- XHTML, and that's why it is
such a poor choice for a data language for conveying web content.

--Kynn
-- 
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Monday, 27 November 2000 15:21:30 UTC